Ван Гог, "Влюблённые", аукцион Сотбис

[jenya444]

И нежные трубы оркестра,
Игравшего вальс довоенный.

Давид Самойлов

Арль, март 1888



Painted in March 1888, the month after van Gogh arrived in Arles, the present work is an intimate depiction of two lovers walking along the bank of a river. It once formed the central motif of a larger composition depicting a pair of lovers walking along a canal path towards the Pont de Réginelle, known locally as the Pont Langlois after the man who operated it. Van Gogh attempted several versions of this composition, in most of which the scene is shown in daylight with the bridge set against a blue sky; however, in one of them Van Gogh wanted to incorporate the brilliant disk of the setting sun. He wrote about this project to his friend, the painter Emile Bernard on March 18 (fig. 2): ‘At the top of this letter I’m sending you a little croquis of a study that’s preoccupying me as to how to make something of it – sailors coming back with their sweethearts towards the town, which projects the strange silhouette of its drawbridge against a huge yellow sun’ (quoted in Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten & Nienke Bakker (eds.), op. cit., 2009, letter no. 587, p. 28). He discussed the work again in a letter to his brother Theo several days later, on March 21 or 22: ‘Rain and wind these past few days, I've worked at home on the study of which I’ve made a croquis in Bernard's letter. My aim was to give it colours like stained glass, and a design of solid outlines’ (ibid., letter no. 588, p. 30).

This bad weather was to prove the artist’s undoing. A Pair of Lovers (Eglogue en Provence) is all that survives of the composition with the setting sun shown in the letter to Bernard; Van Gogh wrote on the 25th March that he had abandoned the work after the weather stopped him painting in situ and his efforts in the studio had failed. However, he evidently felt that the central motif of the pair of lovers was successful and decided to preserve it. In considering this, the Van Gogh Museum note the ‘vigorous execution in terms of brushwork and colour’ and the fact that the rich impasto in the figure of the woman anticipates that of later paintings in Arles (Louis van Tilborgh, ‘Art historical report’, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 2007). Certainly, the figures achieve van Gogh’s stated aim of producing ‘colours like stained glass, and a design of solid outlines’ and in this respect encapsulate what the artist was working towards in this crucial period of his career.